As it must until the day it is officially handed to someone, the list of directors to helm the next Star Wars film must be whittled down from all the possibilities in the galaxy, as each day some famous filmmaker will back away from the awesome responsibility of assuming the franchise and being prematurely hated by its fans with thermal-detonator intensity. Already Zack Snyder took himself out of the running he was never actually in, and today it's Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino who are preemptively backing away from the job no one has officially offered them yet. Everything is proceeding as we have foreseen.

Spielberg—whose name was on that mythical "short list" from yesterday, for what it's worth—told Access Hollywood, "No! No! It's not my genre. It's my best friend George's genre," vehemently refusing any science-fiction stories where aliens are already an accepted reality, thus negating the need to stare at them in awe. And Entertainment Weekly, no doubt presaging weeks of stories like this, randomly asked Tarantino about Star Wars, because he was there, to which Tarantino replied, "I could so care less." Despite this meaning he therefore cares some, and is thus duty-bound by the rules of grammatical pedantry to do it, Tarantino continued, "No, sorry. Especially if Disney’s going to do it. I’m not interested in the Simon West version of Star Wars," causing Con Air director Simon West to get a little unexplained headache. ("What the hell was that?" Simon West wondered. "I felt a disturbance, as though a million manic voices suddenly started talking shit about me for no reason, then were suddenly silenced.")

Anyway, suspend all hopes for this ever becoming a reality, and prepare to hear some version of these sorts of refusals from directors every day, until someone finally takes it. Please, someone ask Werner Herzog.